From a tiny home office to an office in Research Triangle Park, it’s been a steady eight-year climb for Cloud Giants.
The business and technical consulting company, recently named among the Best Places to Work in the Triangle, has grown inch by inch over the years – the “Little Engine That Could” of companies, without raising a single dollar of outside capital.
CEO Kelly Pfrommer said that in bootstrapping, she maintains control. And that includes control over Cloud Giants’ growth trajectory.
“Do good work with the people you enjoy and if it’s not really working out for the parties involved, we change course,” she said.
It’s the opposite strategy of many area startups, struggling to pad their coffers to offset a potential recession. But staying in “neutral” instead of high gear is working for Cloud Giants, a Salesforce-focused consulting agency.
In an interview, Pfrommer talked about Cloud Giants’ roots and its simple strategy – do good business and good business will keep coming.
The origin story
Pfrommer was restless. She was a mom trying to juggle a job and kids – and workplace flexibility was lacking.
“The place I was working didn’t have many options if you didn’t want to work full time,” she said. “I just basically took my skills, being knowledgeable about Salesforce, and started working on my own on the side.”
She didn’t intend to start a company – “it just became that by tinkering.” She realized she wanted the challenge – not the minutiae of standard tasks. So she started by hiring an intern in year one.
“I didn’t really have a good plan of action until year two,” she said. “Year one was lonely.”
The company started in her home office before “expanding” to her kitchen table.
In year two, it became evident that she needed to add employees.
“My time is finite and in order to grow and make more money, I have to have more people,” she said. “It has to be bigger – that’s the only path for this.”
Employees meant an upgrade. The firm moved into shared coworking space at Frontier RTP. It got on a wait list to rent an office, eventually squeezing a team of six people into an office vacated by a group of two. Cloud Giants ended up moving across the street to the 600 building, expanding again.
Today, it’s a team of 35 people with four open positions.
Space is tight – the office has seats for 20 and there are about 28 local employees – but it’s working, for now. Pfrommer said the firm is looking at space options that could accommodate 25 people.
Pfrommer is a patient CEO, “not geared to be in fifth gear all the time … you’ve got to put it in neutral and let it coast.”
She’s worked hard for that kind of flexibility. It’s part of why she started Cloud Giants, so why change it now? Without external funding or debt, her team gets to be deliberate about what business it takes. And the thoughtful approach is particularly important in times of economic uncertainty, she said.
Case in point? The pandemic. When it hit, Cloud Giants lost 20 percent of its business in the span of two weeks.
“We had runway and savings to carry us for quite a long time,” she said.
Pfrommer has a second startup, RevdUp.io, a sales performance management firm. And no, she doesn’t plan on raising venture capital dollars for that company either.
